Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far

The Long View (2016) is a solid guide to building a lasting and meaningful career. Put yourself on the right path by assembling a useful skill set, developing a dynamite personal network and, most importantly, finding a good work-life balance. Work doesn’t have to be miserable and it’s not too late to find a career that can be both emotionally and financially rewarding.

Readers who want to plan for a prosperous future

Young and middle-aged professionals looking to take the next step in their career

Anyone approaching their retirement years

Brian Fetherstonhaugh is CEO of OgilvyOne Worldwide, a successful marketing agency that has been helping big businesses since 1983. Over the years, he’s counseled and mentored thousands of people while giving lectures on career strategy at universities such as Yale, Harvard and Columbia.

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Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far

Synopsis

The Long View (2016) is a solid guide to building a lasting and meaningful career. Put yourself on the right path by assembling a useful skill set, developing a dynamite personal network and, most importantly, finding a good work-life balance. Work doesn’t have to be miserable and it’s not too late to find a career that can be both emotionally and financially rewarding.

Key idea 1 of 8

Job expectations are changing, so we need to rethink how we build our careers.

When you think of your dream job, what do you see? How important is it that your work is appreciated and rewarded? Do you want to be able to learn, have fun and grow as you go along?

These are the kind of questions that The Futures Company asked in 2015 when they tried to get to the bottom of what Americans consider a fulfilling career today.

What they found was that people want a combination of financial success and happiness.

Their poll found that 70 percent of people will choose happiness over financial perks when making career decisions; at the same time, however, 86 percent chose money as the most important factor overall.

This tells us that financial success is important, but ideally, this money won’t come at the expense of happiness or a healthy work-life balance.

As a result, we are seeing an increase in flexible work schedules, with more part-time roles, as well as freelance jobs, work-from-home opportunities and job-sharing offers. All of these are now viable alternatives to the traditional nine-to-five job.

So the question now becomes: how can I put together the right strategy to build a flexible, fulfilling and balanced career?

The answer to this lies in taking all the aspects of your life into consideration and emerging with a path that allows you to be successful without sacrificing important things like family, friends and health.

After all, as career and motivation experts like Dan Pink and Tom Rath point out, a happy work life directly translates into higher productivity, better health and increased satisfaction.

In the blinks that follow, we’ll take a closer look at the tools we need to create a healthy work-life balance and still have a successful career.

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